Special Collections Department

Hugh MacDiarmid

Introduction by Alan Bold

This year sees the centenary of the birth of "Hugh MacDiarmid" (Christopher
Murray Grieve, 1892 - 1978) who would have been delighted by the decision
of the University of Delaware to celebrate his life for he always insisted,
thinking wishfully rather than counting copies of books sold, that his
most attentive readers lived in the USA.

It was with the intention of alerting the general reading public, in
the USA and elsewhere, to the extraordinarily vital art and eventful career
of this great Scot that I wrote MacDiarmid (London: John Murray,
1988; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990; revd edtn London:
Paladin, 1990). My hope of helping rescue MacDiarmid from a fate worse
than literary death--that of being an obsure figure at the mercy of a
squabble of scholars of Scot. Lit.-- was realised by the reception of
the book. It was serialised in the Glasgow Herald, became a number
one bestseller in Scotland and was well received in reviews in all the
major papers.

Until the publication, in 1985, of the Penguin edition of The Complete
Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid (edited by W. R. Aitken and the poet's son
Michael Grieve) one of the greatest poets of the century was, in international
terms, the invisible man of modern verse. Up to that time MacDiarmid's
major works were usually issued either by Scottish firms (Blackwood's
published A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, William Maclellan
published In Memoriam James Joyce) or by somewhat obscure English
imprints (First Hymn to Lenin with the Unicorn Press, Second
Hymn to Lenin with Stanley Nott). In such circumstances, MacDiarmid's
work was not generally accessible though the poet himself would have wished
it otherwise and made efforts to extend his audience. He placed Stony
Limits (1934) with Gollancz but the firm bowdlerised the volume,
deleting some poems as politically and sexually offensive. In 1938 MacDiarmid
approached T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, with the suggestion that they
publish his long poem Mature Art (part of an unfinished epic)
but Eliot declined the work as commercially unviable, if artistically
admirable. MacMillan of New York brought out a Collected Poems
in 1962 but misplaced some texts as well as subdividing A Drunk Man
into segments.

As a result of his relative inaccessibility, MacDiarmid was ignored
in anthologies and critical studies his work would have enhanced: though
his political verse of the 1930s was an example to others (as C. Day Lewis
acknowledged) there is no MacDiarmid poem in Robin Skelton's Penguin Poetry
of the Thirties (1964) and no mention of MacDiarmid in Samuel Hynes's
The Auden Generation (1976). During his lifetime MacDiarmid never
got the credit he deserved and the general reader, as well as the literary
historian, was poorer for the neglect of the poet. As so often happens,
it looks as if MacDiarmid will come into his own posthumously.

My own work on MacDiarmid has been done with the object of establishing
him as a poet of genius with a vision for humankind. I wrote MacDiarmid:
The Terrible Crystal (1983) to confirm him as the peer of Eliot and
Pound and, in 1984, edited three books to let the poet speak eloquently
for himself: The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid, The Thistle
Rises: A MacDiarmid Miscellany and Aesthetics in Scotland.
My biography of MacDiarmid seeks to place him as a national figure who
was also a poet of immense international significance.

Several years ago I wrote a little poem about MacDiarmid "Notice on
MacParnassus", to indicate his unique position as a modern Scottish poet:
"The hill was high, I really would nae hairm it/ Yet had to leave./It
said: "Reserved for Hugh MacDiarmid / (Signed) C. M. Grieve". Many Scots
who knew MacDiarmid by his real name, Chris Grieve, took him for granted
during his life. He was so at ease in pubs, so courteous in conversation,
that it was difficult to equate this convivial character with preconceptions
of the man of genius who expressed such passion in his poetry and such
argumentative anger in his prose. Burns, who encountered the same problem,
said to those who took him lightly: "Ye're maybe wrang". Those who regarded
MacDiarmid as just another one of the boys were equally wrong. MacDiarmid
knew (as he told R. E. Muirhead in 1928) that his best work sprang "from
the deeps of the destined".

It will be increasingly appreciated that MacDiarmid was not only a major
poet, but a compellingly colourful character. He was not only as delicate
a lyricist as Dylan Thomas but a more entertaining drinker, expansive
rather than introspectively morose in his cups. He was not only as outrageously
idiosynctatic as Pound, but a more humane individual, genuinely generous
with his time and energy (he never had much money at any period of his
life). Though economically handicapped by birth and the burden of his
vocation, he led a rich life. He co-founded what is now the Scottish National
Party, he immersed himself in local as well as national politics, he fought
several elections, he had friends as eccentric as Count Potocki of Montalk
and as famous as Sean O'Casey. His two wives, Peggy Skinner and Valda
Trevelyn, were remarkably resourceful women.

Of course, MacDiarmid is not above criticism. His treatment of two of
his mentors, Thomas Scott Cairncross and Francis George Scott, was vindictive
even if it can be explained in terms of rejection of surrogate-father-figures.
His admiration for Stalin as a political superman was monstrously misguided,
a distortion of his need to hail various heroes. His unacknowledged plundering
of lines, and sometimes whole passages, from other men was often disingenuous
as if his approach to the art of poetry was to offer something old, something
new, something borrowed, something read. But, for all these faults, a
great spirit shines through and it must be said that MacDiarmid was deliberately
provocative in order to defeat the enemy, self satisfaction. He constantly
questioned himself as well as others, indeed much of his poetry is a dialogue
between Chris Grieve, the postman's son, and Hugh MacDiarmid, the self
appointed saviour of Scotland.

Had MacDiarmid not been such a complicated character and complex poet
I could certainly not have sustained an interest in him for so long after
meeting him in 1962 when I was 19. And, on a personal level, it was not
always sweetness and light. He could be contrary: a wonderfully diverting
guest at my wedding in 1963 he also, some years later, wrote me a highly
critical letter after I admitted, in an interview with the Sunday
Times, that I had come to see Marxism as a secular religion (with
all the usual dependence on dogma) and not as the science of socialism.
However, we resolved that difference and I did not lose my faith in MacDiarmid
as, quintessentially, a man of integrity. I retain a memory of his marvellous
quality of resolution.

Given his gifts, it is certain there will be no last word on MacDiarmid
and his work will provoke debate as long as people care about poetry.
His best work has an almost unfathomable depth and a mark of his poetic
genius is the enduring quality of his imagery. As a public figure he enjoyed
the art of making enemies and readers might be frequently frustrated by
his habit of unsettling received opinion by subjecting it to his dialectical
poetic processes. Sometimes he adamantly states the opposite of what he
believes. His attitude to Burns is an obvious example. MacDiarmid never
ceased condemning the absurdity of Burns Suppers yet never turned down
an invitation to speak at one. More seriously, he denied that Burns had
influenced his own work, dismissing Burns as "That Langfellow in a but
leid". Yet his work builds on that of Burns. Like Burns, he was a man
of humble birth who transcended circumstances through a determined exposure
to literature; Like Burns, he had an awareness of revolution as an international
issue (Burns was inspired by the American and French Revolutions, MacDiarmid
by the Irish Uprising and Russian Revolution); like Burns, he made a deliberate
literary choice in preferring Scots dialect to English diction.

Another enormous influence on MacDiarmid was Walt Whitman and, like
Whitman, MacDiarmid celebrates himself. In his intellectual autobiography
Unended Quest (1976), Karl Popper declares that "the doctrine of
art as self-expression is merely trivial, muddleheaded and empty--though
not necessarily vicious, unless taken seriously, when it may easily lead
to self-centred attitudes and megalomania." Popper is well known for his
philosophical demolition of systems and his assault on artistic self expressionism
is an effective refutation of a spurious theory. However, in artistic
practice self expressionism need not be "trivial, muddleheaded and empty",
as witness A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. MacDiarmid's quest,
in that poem, for a spiritual self demonstrates that art can be logically
inconsistent yet exhilarating. The apparent contradiction is resolved
in the vision that focuses on what-might-be rather than what incontestably
is. MacDiarmid said "I am a poet; our fools ask me for logic not life."
It is the life in poetry and the poetry in life that ultimately matters
for MacDiarmid.